Re: [asa] Science as Christian vocation

Thanks Ted.
The Reforned and Evangelical American science/faith history has been blessed by a host of excellent historians such as Noll, Marsden, Wacker (and some guy?at Messiah College who shall remain anonymous !), but the Lutheran history either hasn't been covered or I'm not looking at the correct publishing houses.? Martin Marty of course has?covered some of this but not in the same detail.? Or perhaps it simply wasn't an issure within American Lutheranism at the time.

Anybody out there know of any good books on the topic?

Karl
********************
Karl V. Evans
cmekve@aol.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Ted Davis <TDavis@messiah.edu>
To: cmekve@aol.com; asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 6:56 am
Subject: Re: [asa] Science as Christian vocation

Karl asks two really good ones here:

>>> <cmekve@aol.com> 2/10/2009 5:59 PM >>>
Ted,
No one else has taken the bait, so I'll give it a shot.? More questions
than comments I'm afraid.

1.? Was Schmucker's theology influenced by the Mercersburg 'school' ??
There's only one ridge separating the valleys containing Gettysburg and
Mercersburg.? The Lutheran/Reformed divide may have been a bigger
impediment.

2.? How much of SCS's view of God as/in nature is truly classical
liberalism and how much reflects Luther's traditional view that God is in,
with, and under nature.? Kurt Hendel's article in the same issue of Sem.
Ridge Rev. indicates just how much Luther's view of "finitum est capax
infiniti" differs from the Reformed view.? I'm not trying to say that SCS
wasn't a classical liberal, just that this aspect of Lutheran theology is
easily misinterpreted.? Luther avoided pantheism and panentheism, but?was
SCS not so conscious of the theological difficulty?

*******

1. I don't know, b/c I know virtually nothing about the Mercersburg
school, and in general very little about the history of American
Lutheranism. My sense is in any case that SCS was heavily influenced by his
fellow liberal Protestant scientists and clergy. For example, he was close
to Edwin Grant Conklin (a lapsed Methodist who advanced what he called "the
religion of science") and he knew Shailer Mathews (the left-wing theologian
from Chicago) pretty well, too. Everything he writes is consistent with
their attitudes, not with any classical Christian view.

2. To be frank, I do not see where most Lutherans at the time really
thought much about the issues you raise in this question. George Murphy can
probably help me out here, but Lutherans in the 1920s were among the most
conservative of all American denominations. A large percentage of their
pastors believed in pretty literal approaches to Genesis, e.g. (I base this
on a published survey of the views of American clergy at the time.)

Ted

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Received on Wed Feb 11 10:40:02 2009